The Most Popular Blogs of Hacker News in 2025

Summary

With 2025 wrapped up, I can finally answer a question I’m curious about every year: who were the most popular bloggers of Hacker News?Who counts as a blogger?I explain more in my methodology page, but it’s basically anyone who blogs as an individual rather than as part of a company or a team. As an example, John Graham-Cumming is the CTO of Cloudflare, so I count his personal blog but not his posts to the Cloudflare company blog.For the third straight year, Simon Willison was the most popular blogger on Hacker News.At first, Simon’s position at #1 feels obvious: he wrote about AI in a year when everyone’s obsessed with AI. But there are tons of AI bloggers, and Simon is the only one who’s popular on HN, so what sets Simon apart?First, Simon isn’t selling you anything. Simon writes about LLMs as a power user not as a sales pitch from some startup’s VP of product. He tries every AI tool he can get his hands on with no allegiance to any particular vendor. That allows him to write about how new AI tools fit into the ecosystem at large. It’s like getting restaurant recommendations from someone who eats out 20 times a week as opposed to someone who owns 20 restaurant chains.Simon is also one of the most prolific bloggers on Hacker News. In 2025 alone, he wrote over 1,000 blog posts, though only 118 were full-length articles (“only”).Simon often finds ideas within walled-garden platforms (e.g., TikTok, Twitter) and simply brings them to the open web, where it’s easier for HN to discuss. Some of his most popular posts were just short quotes or links with a bit of commentary. “I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel” is just a quote from a video he watched on TikTok. “A computer can never be held accountable” is Simon summarizing a few tweets.Simon has said these types of posts are easy to write yet high in value.Sharing interesting links with commentary is a low effort, high value way to contribute to internet life at large.—Simon Willison, “My approach to running a lin...